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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.516-537
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 10 Feb 2025 Revised 29 Mar 2025 Accepted 21 Apr 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202504.516

Fragmental Patterns in let alone Construction: A Corpus-Based Investigation

Seulkee Park ; Jong-Bok Kim
(first author) Lecturer, Department of English Linguistics and Literature Kyung Hee University seulkeepark@khu.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Linguistics and Literature Kyung Hee University jongbok@khu.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The let alone construction is typically used after a negative statement to emphasize that the statement also applies even more to the referent of its complement. This paper reports a corpus investigation of the construction, investigating the licensor environments of the construction as well as its semantic and pragmatic scalarity conditions. The attested data show us a variety of the construction’s syntactic peculiarities that general syntactic rules cannot predict and the importance of contextual information referring to the discourse structure in question. The attested data further indicate the pivotal roles of the contextual constraints with respect to the contextual scale and prominence between the antecedent and the situation evoked from the construction. Our corpus investigation suggests that a discourse-based approach of the construction is more feasible to account for its flexible distributions in real-life situations including dialogues.

Keywords:

let alone, fragment, focused sensitive item, coordination, scalarity

Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 45th International Computer Archive of Modern English Conference (ICAME 45) and Fragments 2024 Research Seminar, hosted by the Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC) Research Group at the University of Vigo, Spain, where we received helpful feedback. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A2A03052578).

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